Business
& Labor
Fast-Tracked 2008 Olympic Games Landmarks Almost Done
(archrecord.construction.com - 11/06/2006)
By Albert
Warson
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| © Albert Warson |
Construction of the 2008 Olympic Games’
venues is being pushed so aggressively that the shells of
the Olympic Stadium and National Swimming Centre buildings
in Beijing are nearing completion. And the International Sailing
Centre in the coastal city of Qingdao, which opened earlier
this year, has already hosted two international regattas.
There won’t be any of the eleventh-hour
flap over finishing the Olympic Stadium, as there was in Athens
in 2004. Sun Weide, a spokesperson for Beijing’s organizing
committee, said in a recent interview that the Games’
37 competition venues and 76 training venues will be ready
by the end of 2007—more than seven months before the
Olympic torch is lit in the Chinese capital August 8, 2008.
With more than 600,000 visitors expected
for the Games, most of them converging on Beijing, easing
the desperately congested traffic flow is a top priority.
Weide also reported that six roads have been constructed,
while 25 more, plus four new subway lines, are underway.
The new roads and subways will facilitate
access to the Games’ centerpiece, the 100,000-seat National
Stadium, where the Games will ceremonially start and finish,
with track and field events in between. The steel superstructure
of the Herzog & de Meuron–designed “bird’s
nest” stadium is virtually completed; gaps among the
members of what appears to be a roller coaster from hell will
now be filled with inflated ETFE cushions. ETFE (ethylene
tetrafluoroethylene) is a Teflon-like material said to feature
high corrosion resistance and strength over a wide temperature
range [See “2008 Beijing Olympics” story, March
2004 Architectural Record, p. 100].
ETFE also will be used to enclose the
neighboring 70,000-square-meter National Swimming Centre,
more informally known as the Watercube. Designed by Sydney-based
PTW Architects, the organic-looking, various-sized shapes
are crystallized in a massive rectangular form stretched across
a simple steel space-frame internal structure.
Andrew Frost, a PTW director, says the
“elemental shape is specifically designed to work in
harmony with the circular main stadium” and will be used
before and after the games as a multi-purpose leisure and
elite swimming centre. The design “appears random and
playful like a natural system, yet is mathematically very
rigorous and repetitious. The transparency of water, with
the mystery of the bubble system, engages those both inside
and out of the structure to consider their own experiences
with water.”
The swimming facility will house 17,000
spectators and should be completed by year’s end. Ordinarily,
a swimming facility would need a fair bit of heating, but
the absence of such a system has also contributed to the speed
of construction. Kenneth Ma, an Arup mechanical engineer working
on the project, attributes this fact to the EFTE cladding,
which he says creates a very efficient greenhouse: “Ninety
percent of the solar energy falling on the building [is] trapped
within the structural zone and heats the pools and interior
area” during the city’s bitterly cold winters, he
explains.
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